For Colored Girls

"For Colored Girls" is a serious achievement. It takes the 1975 play by Ntozake Shange, which consisted entirely of poetry, and transforms it into a heartfelt narrative feature about a handful of black women, in various walks of life, facing a crisis. The dialogue consists mainly of normal spoken conversation, but then in moments of acute emotion, the dialogue shifts into Shange's poetry, and the women open up their souls with brutal eloquence.

The effect is like watching an opera without music. Or a musical drama in which no one sings. These departures from a realistic convention never feel like static set pieces - that's the great success of the film and of the poems themselves, which are too strong and too inherently dramatic to slow things down. They have their own energy, building and arriving and deepening as they go on.

As such, these poetic interludes become privileged moments of contact, where you get to look right into someone and hear her truest voice. Like a long close-up in a Bergman movie, the effect is intimate and profound, and it satisfies a couple of basic audience yearnings - to experience life at its most intense and to come away with some kind of clue as to what it's like to be someone else.

Tyler Perry, the cross-dressing comedian-filmmaker best known for his "Madea" movies, adapted and directed "For Colored Girls," and it's a real departure. That Perry is funny and skilled has never been a secret. But this new film shows a mastery of tone, a capacity to elicit strong performances and also to bring out different colors within those performances so that, when it all comes together, it's not the same note sounding over and over. This is smart, lovely work.

The characters are loosely related and all going through hell, which means that everyone has big emotions to play. Thandie Newton is Tangie, who uses promiscuity as a drug to ward off pain. She lives next door, in an old apartment building, to Phylicia Rashad as Gilda, a combination busybody/wise woman, and across the hall from Crystal - played by the remarkable Kimberly Elise - who has the biggest cross to bear. Her lover, a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress and alcoholism, is a danger to her and her two kids.

Most of the dilemmas that the women confront might be faced by women of any race or color. Janet Jackson, with the authority of someone who knows how to give orders, plays a business executive whose boyfriend keeps staring at men on the street. Anika Noni Rose is Yasmine, a radiant, confident woman who turns out to be too trusting. Loretta Devine is a social worker, coping with loneliness and a go-nowhere romance. The men in "For Colored Girls," even when they're benign, are infantile, and some are infinitely worse.

Yet even as it transcends the African American experience, "For Colored Girls" communicates something specific and valuable about being black in America. Tammy Wynette said, "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman." "For Colored Girls" is saying, "Sometimes it's even harder to be a black woman." I'd prefer to think it's more a product of the play's original period (the 1970s) than an ongoing condition, but the women here convey a sense of being very much on their own, left to fend for themselves, with neither help nor hope of ever really being understood.

It's as if they're all under some extra measure of pressure. This pressure can manifest in all kinds of ways, including religious fanaticism - Whoopi Goldberg is excellent (and entirely not funny) as a white-robed member of a bizarre cult religion. The beauty of "For Colored Girls" is that characters who fear never being understood get to speak and express themselves with crystalline grace. And so, somehow, what might have been a sad story feels exalted.